Refueling the X-Wing

The Washington Post has an article by Dan Lamothe, who covers national security for The Washington Post and anchors its military blog, Checkpoint, about the Air Force:

The image, of course, depicts the Incom T-65 X-wing Starfighter, the primary spacecraft used by the Rebel Alliance in the Star Wars movie franchise. A version of it was flown by Luke Skywalker to destroy the Death Star in the original 1977 blockbuster, and a modernized version known as the T-70 appeared in last year’s film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

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The photo (clearly doctored, unless the Pentagon is running a secret spacecraft program) shows the T-65 being refueled by a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker. The image was submitted to MacDill Air Force Base, which in turn shared it with its eighteen thousand Facebook followers. To date, it has been shared on Facebook more than a thousand times.
The photo once again shows the long fascination in the US military with the Stars Wars franchise. There’s many examples of it, including President Reagan’s now-defunct Strategic Defense Initiative to intercept enemy nuclear missiles, commonly being referred to as the “Star Wars program”, and a recently retired senior Pentagon official, Andrew  W. Marshall, widely being referred to as Yoda, Skywalker’s sage mentor.

It’s unclear whether the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum saw MacDill’s Facebook post, but it also got in on the X-wing parody act Thursday night. Its submission:

The museum said the craft depicted is a T-56 X-wing “attached to the Carrier Suitability division of the Strike Aircraft Test Directorate at Patuxent River.” As pointed out on the Naval Historical Foundation website last year, the doctored photo is now at least ten years old, and originally looked like this when it was taken in 1942:

A Brewster F2A-3 Buffalo fighter, of Marine Fighting Squadron 211, rests in the flight deck gallery netting after suffering landing gear failure while landing on board the USS Long Island off Palmyra Island on 25 July 1942.

It stands to reason these won’t be the last doctored X-wing photographs we see, but the jokes will continue. Just last summer, General Mark A. Welsh III, chief of staff of the Air Force, told reporters at a breakfast in Washington that the service would continue to find people who want to fly the nation’s most advanced aircraft: “We will continue to get the kinds of people we have gotten for years, who want to come in and fly the F-22, the F-35, the X-Wing fighter,” he said, according to a Wall Street Journal account of the conversation.
Welsh, asked to clarify whether he was referring to the Star Wars spacefighter, responded, “Oh, heck yes,” and then vowed jokingly that the service would have one someday.
The publication of this piece has led to a series of questions on social media. Consider this, which asks how much fuel an X-wing aircraft needs to complete the Kessel Run, an intergalactic smuggling route in “Star Wars”:

How much JP-8 does an X-Wing need for the Kessel Run?

That led one journalist to wonder whether Peter Singer, the co-author of the military strategy thriller Ghost Fleet, could get the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency to weigh in during a panel discussion Singer was moderating at a “tech summit” sponsored by Defense One on Friday:

I feel like this is a good question for the @usairforce or @DARPA. Uncertain if they will answer.

Singer responded:
I’m not sure, but I think DARPA just predicted X-wing technology is imminent.

And so did DARPA:
Our deputy director did say we anticipate great progress in space technologies in the next five years...

Rico says they're just being silly...